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Saturday, March 12, 2011

Just Gotta Share...

I should be getting showered, visiting my parents and mentally prepping for the second night of our show...but Dave's been inspired to put together a $16 clearance bookshelf for our office. So, while I give him the occasional hand putting together the pressboard-can't-believe-how-cheap-o-it-is-but-will-serve-its-purpose-for-now monstrosity, I thought I'd share with you guys an inspiration for our FUTURE office.

This space has given us many a headache. We've currently got one 5-shelf bookshelf, 3 very random desks (which Dave likes because they're "ecclectic" -- I've come to dislike all of them, but agree that we need to keep the good-quality rustic one for any future children), and a mess. The room is also awkwardly-shaped, with one wall being half of a slanted ceiling (sharing the roofline) and the other side giving us a strange angled...conundrum. Just...weird. We've splattered the walls with tons of mismatched art (from newspaper articles Dave wrote to cartoon films to my Philadelphia Story poster), but it just doesn't feel like anything more than a mismatch.

So, after lots of thought, we're still not positive what to do with it. We hardly use the space because it just doesn't work for our needs. But, I've got some ideas...once again, thanks to my favorite blog, Young House Love.

They do a house crashing series, showing some truly inspirational homes and spaces to drool over, and the fact that this one wasn't the largest of houses helps our situation. Here's the link for their "House Crashing: Stunning In Sydney" post, but I'll be sharing a couple of pictures that I think will help us in our office organizing journey. (Giving props now: I don't own these, they're from YHL! Hoping they don't mind.)

This picture shows a very simple office. Doesn't seem like much, but I'm in love with it. I'm actually thinking of making a wall-length desk using another method shown on YHL (utilizing inexpensive doors...yup), but their use of sawhorses is awesome. However, what I'm really grooving on in this shot is the above storage. To accompany the wall-length desk idea, I'm thinking that wall-length shelving (using all the vertical space available -- which, honestly, isn't THAT much thanks to the pitched ceiling) would give us tons more storage and decorating options; very clean, very useful...and I want to figure out an inexpensive way to do it.

Another possibility for added storage is through the use of even more shelving, but in a different format. See, we really do own a lot of frickin' books...and other (pardon) crap. If this shelving can keep kiddie stuff in order, just think what it can do for us grown-ups! (Although, admittedly, we've got so much random paraphernalia, it might not look too different from what you're seeing.)

So, there are just a couple of ideas that will hopefully help to transform our third bedroom's "boring, cluttered office" status to a "more modern, clean, actually-wanna-spend-time-there" place. Oh, and I KNOW there's some hardwood hiding under this carpet (which may not even HAVE to be refinished -- the other two bedrooms are livable with the hardwood that we uncovered), so that'll add a completely different dimension, too.